claire rousay & Martyna Basta - hotel room (2026)

Martyna Basta and claire rousay find common ground in liminality on 'hotel room', echoing David Lynch's 'The Return'-era dream logic over a sequence of hypnotic, weightless cues lifted by bold ASMR-rich sound design and soporific instrumentation.

It's rare for a collaboration to hit the central point between two artists' individual approaches, but 'hotel room' does exactly that. There's no sense of conflict or creative friction on the album's lengthy opener 'zoom', rather we hear just how the two sounds braid into a single voice. Basta's singularly engaging electroacoustic textures and phantasmagorical whispers are tuned so perfectly with rousay's elongated bowed tones that you hardly notice the evolution when scraped, processed percussion and ominous violins morph into thick, spectrum-filling electro-plated orchestral swells. It's beatless, but not ambient in any real sense of the word; the pair work as if they're composing a score, piquing their soundscapes with genuinely unsettling dramatic shifts, pregnant pauses and diegetic interjections.

On 'lot and found', for example, rousay and Basta meander through their own low-key odyssey, trudging across scorched ground on a bed of listless piano phrases and guitar improvisations. A wordless AutoTuned siren call echoes over the gusty backdrop and although a song never emerges, we're left with vivid images all the same. And 'denim' sidesteps into unexpectedly imposing territory, beginning with detuned zither twangs and descending into a reflecting pool of oozing resonances and angelic chorals. The album reaches its apex with 'where are you now', simmering for a spell with emotions that could boil over at any time. A music box rings out and it's as if we're being ushered into an empty room in the Overlook, but the duo reward us with a burst of fractal euphoria: low, subby drones, crystalline pads and witchy screams that neatly foreshadow the brief, sharbat-sweet finale 'cool girls go to heaven'.